The Labor Day weekend is upon us, and that means summer is drawing to a close. Already the pumpkin spice has begun to flow. But it also means my BYONDiversary was this week! Wednesday was my 20th, which is a huge deal.

Last week's move for 514 into the stable release channel was, to put it mildly, a disaster, but things are much better sorted now. 514.1566 has been looking very good. I did get a new animation bug report today for the most recent 514.1566 build, but it only applies to /image and /client so overall this is a big improvement, and I have a fix ready to go for the next maintenance release. I may even buck the Friday curse for that, because the bug fixes I have ready to go are minor.

Under the hood in 515, I've added the new JSON stuff I talked about last week, and I'm getting to work on some high-priority features for rendering. However, in the process of getting to work on them I realized my life is gonna be a lot simpler if I can tackle another project that's been in my way for ages: ditching the software renderer for the map editor. The editor doesn't even strictly use the rendering code, and that's what I need to address.

To get started I've been refactoring a lot of stuff like old var names that were always terrible. Our client-side pre-render code had var names like border_cview_x0/x1, inner_cview_px0/px1/px2, etc. Do you know what those mean? Neither did I. All that code was held together by duct tape, so I made some changes that should make it easier to handle and in many cases also eliminate some pointless calculations. The reason for those changes however is so I can split out GetMapIcons() into more sub-functions, and allow the map editor to use it for sorting and for building a render list.

So it looks like overall we might be seeing a major overhaul to the map editor, at least in how it displays, as one of the major features to come down the pike. And if this works out, I can offer some more advanced features like allowing a developer to simulate having plane masters and render targets on their screen, which currently can't be done without actually running the game.

This also means I need to step up work on a long-requested feature to flatten appearances into icons more easily. It's relevant to the map editor but also to right-click menus and browser interfaces. The SS13 folks refer to this as GetFlatIcon() and that's what I've been calling the concept internally so far.

I want to sincerely thank everyone who contributed to BYOND this past month as Members or donors, including our regular supporters on other platforms like Patreon and SubscribeStar. It was a better than average month and I'm incredibly grateful for your continued support.

On that subject, by popular request I'm also looking into setting up a merch store, because multiple people have said they'd be down to buy BYOND merch. We used to have one long ago, but it'd be good to get that going again. I'm wide open to ideas for designs, and I'm looking at Printful as the POD supplier so if you see any of their products you'd love a BYOND or BYOND-adjacent design on, let me know!

I have sadly decided that one trip to the Fair is enough for me this year, for multiple reasons, and must hope that everything will be better in 2022. But oh well, sometimes life is like that. I still love this time of year and plan to make it count, and I hope you all do the same. Have a great weekend and I'll be back at work Tuesday!